alt Hacker NewsUnlike the dot-com era, this is a bubble that everyone saw coming.
Like dot-com, there are many long-term winners, but cash hungry frontier labs are not among them.
Prediction:
OpenAI, Anthropic, Oracle, and SpaceX[1] go down and assets be sold or companies acquired for a fraction of their valuation. The same goes for most neoclouds. Profitable "old" tech companies like MS, Google, Meta, and Amazon are fine and scoop up the valuable parts for pennies.
Nvidia will be in Cisco's position (Cisco was the world's most valuable company in the dot-com era). Both are good companies that are not going anywhere, but stock prices get decimated when markets collapse (Nvidia liabilities are not high enough to take company down, they are mostly tied to there not being a bubble and data centers are getting built)
[1] Everyone already knows that, according to SpaceX, > 80% of SpaceX's valuation is in AI, not in space stuff, right?
Replies
Agree with you overall, but:
> Unlike the dot-com era, this is a bubble that everyone saw coming.
As far as I recall, the dot-com bubble was widely seen as such prior to it bursting. E.g. Greenspan and Buffet were both quite vocal about the irrationality of the values being assigned to companies.
Nvidia probably doesn't really have really serious liabilities as long as it has actually produced all the GPUs it has sold on a buy-and-hold basis.
It's fabless, right? So they haven't even built out wasted manufacturing capacity.
As long as the GPUs they have sold are really sitting in a warehouse in Taiwan or somewhere in the USA, they are making properly concrete money.
The fact that nobody else is making real money, that will eventually come back to bite them, but Nvidia will just see its business shrink; it will have to scale back if the bubble bursts, but it will get out with much of that money intact.
My prediction is the same. I think MS, Google, and Amazon will be the winners here. They might take a hit when OpenAI and Anthropic blow up, bu they can absorb it, and are well positioned to provide those services in a reasonably sustainable fashion. I suspect the costs of using AI will be considerably higher at that point (subscriptions will be extremely limited or just non-existent). Meta does not benefit in this case since it doesn't provide compute, but they have money to waste (as they did with Metaverse, VR, etc).
Interesting take. How high is that probability within the next five years, do you think?